Revolution on Our Mind: Two Hundred Fifty Years Since the Declaration of Independence

Next year will mark 250 years since the “official” date assigned to the rebellion against British sovereignty in its North American colony, popularly known as the “American Revolution.” In early July of 1776, a number of prominent figures and leaders of colonial resistance to the authority of the English Crown met in the port city of one of the English colonies and signed a resolution and an audacious document declaring independence. The impressively crafted and innovative document drew an administrative and military response from English authorities in both London and the colonies and forced the colonies to plan their next defiant move. If Philadelphia was the cradle of the revolution, the Declaration of Independence was its founding document.

As with past celebrations of the revolution, there will be reenactments, speeches, and other self-congratulatory virtue-signaling. Politicians will compete to ascribe their own views to the founding principles. Every opportunity will be taken to commercialize the event from Ken Burns’ calculated-to-be-unchallenging televised take (already underway!) on the colonial uprising to meaningless flyovers of outdoor events and endless volleys of fireworks.

Anniversaries, like next year’s, understandably bring out a reconsideration, a reevaluation, and a renewed search for the meaning of the widely regarded event. And given the fractures in US politics, the conclusions will be contested between diverse perspectives and hostile ideologies. For many, if not most, the US is at a crossroads and understanding its past is likely a crucial determinant of the way forward.

One must begin with the account of the revolution foisted on young minds in the mandatory American History classes of the US public high schools. While these courses may stop short of the extreme fabulism of Founding Father sainthood, they reproduce the mythology of the liberation of a “discovered” land marching through history as a virtuous exception to the greed and malice of the old world and a benevolent friend to those seeking to escape oppression and backwardness. Unfortunately, these classes too often stamp an indelible, lingering impression on those who suffer this miseducation.

The venerated writers, Charles and Mary Beard, in their now-neglected 1927 classic, The Rise of American Civilization, sharply dismiss the crudest contending myths:

The oldest hypothesis, born of the conflict on American soil, is the consecrated story of school textbooks: the Revolution was an indignant uprising of a virtuous people, who loved orderly and progressive government, against the cruel, unnatural, and unconstitutional acts of King George III. From this same conflict arose, on the other side, the Tory interpretation: the War for Independence was a violent outcome of lawless efforts on the part of bucolic clowns, led by briefless pettifoggers and smuggling merchants, to evade wise and moderate laws broadly conceived in the interest of the English-speaking empire. Such were the authentic canons of early creeds.

With the flow of time appeared some doubts about the finality of both these verdicts. 

The Beards, like many others, especially those in the Marxist tradition, understood the role of both class and economic interests in the unfolding of the revolution. Their work joins with the account of the equally underappreciated Marxist scholar, Herbert Morais, in stressing the importance of English mercantilism in generating the contradiction between England and its colonies. In The Struggle for American Freedom (1944), Morais recognizes the tension between merchants and manufacturers in England and the New World, especially in New England:

While the southern provinces could be made to fit into the English mercantile system, the New England colonies could not. The simple reason for this was that they produced practically nothing which the mother country wanted. Their farm products-- wheat, rye, barley, and oats-- were like those in England. Their fisheries served only to draw away profits from English fishermen and to hamper the growth of the English fishing fleet. The rapidly developing industries of New England acted as a direct threat to the prosperity of English manufacturers who considered the colonies an outlet for their goods. New England shipping drained off English seamen and competed with English traders for the commerce of the West Indies, the Wine Islands, and the Mediterranean.

While the southern colonies did indeed enjoy strong trade with the “motherland” -- tobacco, indigo, rice-- their perpetual debt to English financiers gave reason to coalesce with Northern resistance. 

For Morais, this contradiction-- especially in the shadow of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-- soured “imperial-colonial relations”:

English control over America was extended by converting proprietary and corporate colonies into royal provinces, a move which was obviously dictated by the mercantilistic interests of the English ruling classes. In all of the royal colonies dual power existed: the governor representing the external authority and the colonial assembly the internal. Throughout the provincial period (1689-1763), these two forces struggled for supremacy, the fundamental issue at stake being: Who was to rule over America? 

Is Morais likening the period of dual power in the colonies to the dual power between the Soviets and the Duma before the 1917 October Revolution in Russia? Is he suggesting that economic friction between two class hierarchies-- one in England, one over three thousand miles away-- led to an unsustainable dual power, resolved by revolution?

For Morais, the colonial agency for this struggle for power came from two class bases: the aggrieved “merchant and planter classes” and the working classes-- farmers, mechanics, artisans, and day laborers. These classes united under the banner of revolution, but pursued two distinct struggles: “...the struggle for self-government and national independence and the struggle among the American people themselves for a more democratic order.”

Herbert Aptheker, a Marxist historian and admirer of Morais, writing in The American Revolution 1763-1783 (1960) accepted Morais’ two struggles, and added a third current: 

The American Revolution was the result of the interpenetration of three currents: the fundamental conflict of interest between the rulers of the colonizing power and the vast majority of the colonists [Morais’ struggle for national independence]; the class stratification within the colonies themselves and the resulting class struggles that marked colonial history which almost always found the British imperial power as a bulwark of the reactionary or the conservative interests in such struggles [Morais’ struggle for a more democratic order]; and the developing sense of American nationality, transcending class lines, which resulted from the varied origins of the colonies’ peoples, their physical separation from England, the different fauna and flora and climate of their surroundings, their different problems and interests, their own developing culture and psychology and even language, their common history, and from their own experience of common hostility-- varying in degree and place and time--- towards the powers-that-be in England.

Aptheker’s third current assumes a more fully developed “American” identity than evidence permits. Many historians note that inhabitants of the colonies maintained a closer identification with their specific colony-- Massachusetts, Virginia, etc.-- than with the entire largely English-speaking North American project. Moreover, nearly all concede that the population was divided deeply between Patriots, neutrals, and Tories (Richard Bell calculates that roughly 40% of colonists were Patriots, 40% were indifferent, and 20% Tories, in his excellent The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (2025)). With these divisions, the revolutionary era was hardly fertile soil for a widely accepted national identity.

In fact, Aptheker may be confusing cause with effect; the revolution created a national identity, rather than being the cause of it.

Aptheker reminds us that V.I. Lenin, in his Letter to American Workers (1918) famously wrote that:

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world. [my emphasis]

The highlighted area is often cited without reference to Lenin’s comparison with the mindless, bloody clashes of empires, fought not over any liberatory cause, but from personal or ruling-class interest. It is sometimes overlooked that Lenin goes on to laud with equal or greater enthusiasm “...the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!”. It reminds us that Lenin always ascribes “revolutionary significance” in the context of time and place. The “greatness” of the American Revolution draws its greatness from the context of an original, successful, and unlikely national liberation. Yes, it is a national liberation tarnished by the original sin of aboriginal displacement and genocide and stained by the national embrace of chattel slavery.

For some, the “greatness” of the American Revolution is a challenging reach. Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, comparing the US colonial revolution with the French Revolution, observes in his Echoes of the Marseillaise (1990): 

Indeed, the comparatively modest international influence of the American Revolution itself-- must strike the observer. As a model for changing social and political systems it was absorbed, as it were, and replaced by the French Revolution, partly because reformers or revolutionaries in European societies could recognize themselves more readily in the ancien régime of France than in the free colonists and slave-holders of North America. Also, the French Revolution saw itself, far more than the American had, as a global phenomenon, the model and pioneer of the world’s destiny.

Some might point to Hobsbawm’s reference to “reformers or revolutionaries in European societies” as reflecting a narrow Eurocentric view of the impact of the US revolution, noting that a vastly influential Asian revolutionary like Ho Chi Minh cited the Declaration of Independence as enormously influential to the Vietnamese struggle for independence. Moreover, Richard Bell’s recent book-- cited above-- argues persuasively that the revolution’s reach was global and profound:

…winning independence required a world war in all but in name. What began as a domestic dispute over taxes, trading rights, and home rule soon metastasized into something much bigger and broader, pulling in enslaved people as well as Native people and French and Spanish speakers living along the length of the Mississippi River. And it kept expanding outward, reverberating across every habitable continent and spreading tumult, uncertainty, and opportunity in all directions.

Marxist William Z. Foster would largely agree, though he would place the US revolution in the context of a long period of “hemispheric revolution,” stretching for about sixty years: “The several national political upheavals constituted one general hemispheric revolution. Taken together, they were by far the broadest revolutionary movement the world had known up to that period.”

For Foster, in his Outline Political History of the Americas (1951), “The heart of this great movement was a revolutionary attack against the feudal system. It was the broad all-American bourgeois, i.e., capitalist, revolution.”

The broad hemispheric revolution may be made to fit revolutions against feudal relations to some extent, if we view Spanish and Portuguese domination as imposing the mother countries’ feudal system on their colonies. But surely England was not imposing feudalism on its colonies, since both the 1640 revolution and the so-called “glorious” revolution of 1688 had liberated England from nearly all but the ceremonial grip of feudal absolutism. And the quasi-feudal slavocracy of the Southern states was left largely untouched by the rebellion against England. 

Perhaps Foster meant to take the US revolution as a rebellion against the vestiges of feudalism-- the imperious reign of the monarch, George III-- existing in a country well on its way toward bourgeois domination. Or maybe Foster saw the frequent royal granting of vast tracts of land to favored absentees or expatriates as an expression of feudal grants, though they did not result in classic feudal manorial relations. 

Leftist historian, Greg Grandin, would agree that the rebellion in the North American colonies had an impact far beyond that sliver of coastline: “And so Spain joined France [in supporting the colonial cause] escalating a provincial rebellion into an imperial world war: Charles and Louis against George.” In his ambitious and insightful America, América: A New History of the New World, Grandin shows that the “hemispherical revolutions” while sharing much, also differed radically in their fundamental assumptions. In the English-speaking North, there was a privileged sense of destiny, of self-righteousness, while the Southern rebellion sought dignity and independence. Grandin expressed the difference through the voices of leading intellectuals:

Compare… Venezuela’s independence manifesto… to [the] Declaration of Independence. History barely gets a tug from Jefferson. All is nature, freed from the burden of society. All the New World’s evils are placed at the feet of King George. The original settlers and their heirs who claimed the land and drove off its original inhabitants did no wrong. They only suffered wrongs. For John Adams, North America was “not a conquered, but discovered country.”

In contrast, [for Jefferson’s Venezuelan counterparts], the New World wasn’t discovered, but “conquered.” They knew that America was a stolen continent. The Conquest hovers over their independence manifesto, an event so vile it set the course for centuries of human events.

How these differences play out over a century of conflict, mistrust, and intervention between North and South is the subject of Grandin’s 2025 book, where he recounts their different trajectories-- framed by discovery or conquest-- and how those differing ideas shaped the world.

We gain much in understanding the historical limitations of the US rebellion by comparing its foundations with that of the other national liberation movements in the Americas.

Important Left historian, Gerald Horne, casts further shade over the eighteenth-century uprising by declaring it not a revolution, but a counter-revolution against the anticipated outlawing of slavery in England. Horne’s provocative thesis in The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014) argues that the avowed high-minded principles of the revolution’s elites were overshadowed by the interests of the slaveholding planters (the majority of the Declaration’s signers were slave-owners). While indisputable evidence of the so-called Founding Fathers’ ultimate motivation would be hard to come by, their material interests are certainly relevant. By reminding us of those slaveholding interests, Horne is rendering a service, just as Charles Beard did with his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), by serving as a reminder of the racial and class interests of the revolution’s leaders and the Constitution's authors. Yet both limit the meaning of the revolution and the Constitution to those narrow interests and deny the role of the broader masses on determining the revolution’s fate and impact.

Arguably the most well-known left account of the revolution is found in Howard Zinn’s widely influential A People's History of the United States (1980). Zinn-- an active participant in the post-Red Scare US New Left-- takes a radically different tactic from Horne and others influenced by Marx. For Zinn, elites were constantly seeking to tame, to restrain, to channel the direction of energized masses away from revolution, away from decisive action. Drawing from the history-from-below school of historical studies and adhering to the 1960s student-left ideology of radical democracy, he stresses the spontaneity and self-motivation of common folk. One might say that his analysis of 1776 foretells the Occupy movement of our time:

Mechanics were demanding political democracy in the colonial cities: open meetings of representative assemblies, public galleries in the legislative halls, and the publishing of roll-call votes, so that the constituents could check on representatives. They wanted open-air meetings where the population could participate in making policy, more equitable taxes, price controls, and the election of mechanics and other ordinary people to government posts.

Rebellion is natural and instinctive for Zinn, as he experienced it with 1960s youth. The danger is perceived as conservative elements, elites, authoritarians, fear-mongers, or others obstructing the wave of spontaneous social change. It is an appealing, though romantic view, and one that continues to seduce many who obstinately resist the necessity of planning and organization in social change. 

For each interpretation of the US revolution discussed here and many others unmentioned, there are sets of particular circumstances-- like those of Zinn-- that shaped that interpretation to a greater or lesser extent. Each writer wrote at a time and place that shaped how they would think about the revolution. 

Charles and Mary Beard's thinking was undoubtedly influenced by their knowledge of populist risings of the late nineteenth century that brought class questions to the fore. They looked at the revolution through that lens.

Hobsbawm’s negative view of the significance of the US revolution came at a time of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe that surely added to his growing skepticism about revolutionary change. Only the iconic French Revolution remained of historic significance to him.

Aptheker, writing with the popular front to his back and facing a hell of McCarthyite red-baiting and repression, understandably stressed the political innovations of the US revolution, especially its rejection of official oppression and its call for liberty.

For Grandin, his long engagement supporting solidarity movements with Central and South America unsurprisingly influenced his circumspection regarding the US revolution.

And Horne’s reinterpretation came amidst growing frustration with officially tolerated, if not encouraged, violence and murder of Black people. Its coincidence with the Black Lives Matter movement gave it greater relevance. And undoubtedly, it gave inspiration to the New York Times 1619 Project, which commanded attention in the struggle against racism.  

Whether we like it or not, next year's orgy of celebration will conjure a myriad of interpretations of the “American Revolution” with a myriad of claims about their significance for today. The entire political spectrum will offer lessons of the revolution for those seeking an exit from the profound crises of this moment. In reality, much can be learned from a study of the period, making participation in the discussion worthwhile and necessary.

In that regard, consider the observations of the then-Soviet scholar, Vladimir Sogrin. In Founding Fathers of the United States (1988), he wrote:

The historical situation, the unique natural conditions and geographical position were propitious for the development of the progressive social system in the United States. It emerged as a bourgeois state, bypassing all the preceding socio-historical formations, so that American capitalism did not have to destroy feudal foundations, a process which took other countries scores and even hundreds of years to complete. This enabled the bourgeois socio-economic system to advance with seven-league strides, and speeded up the establishment in the country of republican and other progressive principles inscribed on the banner of the Enlightenment…

Acknowledgement of the progressive nature of the transformations effected by the American Revolution and the American Republic gives no grounds for their idealization. American liberal historians’ attempts to prove that an “empire of reason”, which the European enlighteners dreamed about, was established in North America under the impact of the revolution is to me an example of an apologetic interpretation. The ideals of the Enlightenment were by far not realized, like, for instance, its fundamental principle of equal legal and political rights for all, as it did not embrace the blacks, Indians, women and indigent white men…

The US War of Independence ushered in, rather than completed, the era of bourgeois revolutions in North America.

We should ponder whether today--nearly two hundred and fifty years later-- the US is ripe for another revolution, a revolution that would take us well beyond the revolution conjured by the fifty-six lawyers, merchants, planters, and elites who gave us the original Declaration. May the next one be for independence from capitalism. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Stagflation: Stagnation, Inflation, and Beyond

Since my prediction in April of 2007 of an impending economic crash, I've vowed not to risk my unblemished record with any further predictions. But a simple thing that I learned from the run-up to that catastrophe was when the “little people” -- the “every man and every-woman” -- found their way into stock market speculation, trouble was looming. Early in 2007, I recall acquaintances then announcing that they were day-traders, bragging that they were making more money buying and selling on their devices than from their regular job. 

The Wall Street Journal headlined in early October that More Working-Class Americans Than Ever Are in the Stock Market. “Among Americans with incomes between $30,000 and $80,000, 54% now have taxable investment accounts. Half of these investments have entered the market in the last five years according to…Commonwealth and the BlackRock Foundation.” 

A red flag.

And also, I learned that when the investment commentariat-- not the media cheerleaders-- sound the alarm, Marxists should listen. It’s a curious thing that academic Marxist economists, who frequently claim to foresee future crises in broad terms of overproduction and rate of profit, seldom cite the views of those solely driven by money-making realities. The Wall Street Journal, hedge fund managers, investor consultants, and others of the pursuing-alpha herd are good sources of alarm for market volatility as opposed to the capitalism-boosters of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

When a few weeks pass with the front page of The Wall Street Journal warning Credit Markets Are Hot, But Froth Is Worry and OpenAI’s For-Profit Restructuring Draws Pushback, Rattling Executives and Persistent Inflation, Soft Jobs Data Pull Fed in Two Directions and Shutdown Starting To Exact Its Toll on Business and Volatility Returns To Haunt Stock Market, it might be time to sit up and take notice.

When financial sites like QTR’s Fringe Finance-- not one to mince words-- announces Sh*t is Breaking… And it’s Going To Get Worse or when Reuters Morning Bid coins the jingle Bubble, bubble toil and trouble or when Wolf Street raises the alarm that Corporate Profits in Nonfinancial Industries Plunge by Most Ever in $, amid Massive Downward Revisions, it might be just the moment to question the health of the US economy.

More red flags.

The truth is that the US economy is strapped with two intractable, life-sucking issues.

First, the post-2007-2009 economic crisis has never been resolved. The US has foisted the damage onto its partners, subsidized sick and floundering corporations, run up enormous debts through monetary pump-priming schemes, fostered new armament production through escalating global confrontations, and sold investors on shaky, over-hyped “innovations.” That same concerted effort to overcome the deflationary tendency spawned by the financial collapse overshot the mark, generating a powerful inflationary trend. 

As I’ve argued emphatically since 2021-- contrary to the punditry-- inflation is rarely, if ever, a momentary, episodic development. It does not go away with policy tinkering or rebalancing. Once prices begin to rise, businesses and corporations try to catch up or get ahead. The floodgates of profit-taking and profit-preservation will not be easily closed. For those who fashionably love to borrow Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the conventional thinking on inflation fetishizes price rises, hiding the fact that inflation is the result of human decisions and human (capitalist) interests. And when capitalists see an opportunity to raise prices, they seize it.

Compounding the last four years of persistent inflation is stagnation in the non-financial economy. Economic growth-- apart from the stock market, the pocketbooks of the very rich, and the bloated military budget-- is slow and slowing. In November of 2021, I reminded readers of the dangerous return of 1970s “stagflation” in an article aptly entitled When Have We Seen This Before?. Of course, the dilemma is that government efforts to invigorate the stalling economy will only further increase inflation.

Second, the economy is currently in the hands of a helmsman without a compass. President Trump’s economic policies are decidedly a departure from the conventional reliance on the Federal Reserve as a somewhat independent arbiter and navigator of economic policy, from the reliance on and guidance from Bureau of Labor Statistics and Commerce Department data, from some self-preserving restraint of corporate and financial excess, and from muting obscenely deep and unrestrained graft and corruption. Trumpism is elite enrichment on steroids, the public be damned. Reportedly, Communist Party of China Chairman Xi believes that Trump is not ideological, but “transactional.” That would well summarize his economic program.

Whether Trump’s approach is politically sustainable is one question. Whether it will add confusion and misdirection to escaping stagflation is not in question. It will make things worse.

What are the markers, suggesting economic hardship and a rocky road ahead?

• Inflation shows no sign of a letup, still well above the consensus goal. While Trump has “declared” it defeated, consumers are even more alarmed than the numbers suggest, with grocery store prices a particularly sensitive arena for shoppers. The full weight of Trump’s tariffs has yet to spread through the economy, promising even further price elevation.

• Hiring is falling off; businesses are hiring fewer people. Though limited hiring has not yet resulted in a dramatic change in unemployment, it foretells an increase in those jobless.

• Real average hourly earnings growth is tepid, growing .7% from August 2024 to August 2025. Median household incomes remained largely unchanged last year, adjusted for inflation. When higher incomes are extracted, the numbers for most households are in decline.

• Outlandish financial schemes are back and collapsing, especially around the used-car market. As in 2007-2009, irrational, super-exploitive lending patterns have generated unserviceable debt with lower-income consumers. Car-loan delinquencies have reached 5.1%, a level approaching that of the earlier financial crisis.

• While stocks appear to be booming, their price-to-earnings ratio-- a traditional measure of overvaluation recently hit 22.5, one of the highest readings in the last forty years.

• Investor fear of market volatility is reflected in the great demand for the safety of gold, a commodity hitting its all-time high in price. Other signs of the turn toward safety are emerging. 

• The driver of stock-market growth is almost entirely artificial intelligence (AI) and its data centers. With immediate investment in AI estimated in hundreds of billions of dollars (as much as three-quarters of a trillion globally), little return on investment has materialized. OpenAI is expected to return only $13 billion this year. Morgan Stanley calculates that the entire industry only sold $45 billion in products last year. Many see a bubble much like the fiber-optic mania of 2000.

• Bank failures have prompted JP Morgan Chase’s top dog, Jamie Dimon, to quip “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more”.

• Private, direct credit-- a growing factor in finance-- has a default rate of over 8%, the highest ever.

• Class divisions are intensifying. Annual wage and salary growth for the bottom third of households through August of this year was lower than any year since 2016. At the same time, growth for the top third grew four times faster than that of the lower third. For the first time, consumer spending by the top 10% of earners was nearly half of total consumption.

• The Black unemployment rate went from 6.1% last August to 7.5% this August, a harbinger of employment trends: last hired, first fired.

• Recent college graduates are experiencing one of the highest unemployment rates of the last decade, another harbinger of a weak labor market.

• More children are claimed to suffer from some food inadequacy than at any time in nearly a decade; the US Department of Agriculture estimated the number at 13.8 million in its 2023 report. The Census Bureau similarly reports that nearly ten million children live in poverty, the most since 2018. The Trump Administration has halted the USDA survey of hunger in the US.

The high interest rates established to contain inflation are predictably slowing real, material economic activity and large consumer purchases for the majority. Four years of rising interest rates have made debt service a growing burden, as well as making the refinancing of debt costly. 

Economic royalty and their courtiers are publicly downplaying the growing inflation in a desperate effort to convince the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and stimulate tepid economic activity. Should the Federal Reserve comply, inflation will undoubtedly accelerate to the great harm of most working people. Historically, stagflation ends with a deep recession, like the painful Reagan recession of 1981-1982. 

Many in ruling-class circles believe that a new wave of innovation will rescue the sluggish, fragile economy with the exploitation of Artificial Intelligence. They foresee a new age of high productivity and growth. 

However, research by JP Morgan Chase economists has failed to find a significant connection yet between the use of AI and industrial productivity. So far, it has boosted stock market values enormously, without showing a concurrent return on investment.

James Meek, writing in the October 9, 2025 issue of The London Review of Books, may well have captured where AI has taken us and how far it has to go:

Leaving aside the known problems…-- their massive energy use, their ability in malign human hands to create convincing fake versions of people and events, their exploitation without compensation of human creative work, their baffling promise to investors that they will make money by taking the jobs of the very people who are expected to subscribe to them, their acquired biases, their difficulty in telling the difference between finding things out and making things up, their de-intellectualizing of learning by doing students’ assignments for them, and their emerging tendency to reinforce whatever delusions or anxieties their mentally fragile users already carry-- leaving aside all this, the deep limitations of generative AI make it hard to see it as anything but a dead end if AGI is the goal.

Faith that AI is more than a possibly malign novelty is based on confidence that the tech oligarchs have a vision of our future that benefits us all.

Not likely.

Is economic reckoning on the horizon?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

“Settling Accounts” on the Question of Imperialism

Writing in 1908-- six years before the first great inter-imperialist war and eight years before writing his landmark text on imperialism-- Lenin reminded us of the many ideological roadblocks that Marxism had to overcome before consolidating its position in the working-class movement.

First, Marx had to “settle accounts” with the Young Hegelians, then with Proudhonism, Bakuninism, and so on until scientific socialism became the dominant left factor in the workers’ movement in the late 1800s. 

Subsequently, the danger to ideological unity came from left and right-- largely right-- revisions of the revolutionary kernel that Marx and Engels had left us. “And the second half-century of the existence of Marxism began (in the nineties) with the struggle of a trend hostile to Marxism within Marxism itself.”

Today, all of those misguiding tendencies have become unsettled both outside and inside the Marxist movement. Ironically, as interest in Communism has become more acceptable with young people in reaction’s heartland-- the US-- confusion over once-settled matters grows more widely; the legacy of those hard-fought ideological struggles becomes lost to the dim past. 

It is a formidable task to rebuild the Marxist tradition that dominated the anti-capitalist workers’ movement in the twentieth century, but one necessitated by the inequality, the chaos, and the destruction wrought by unbridled capitalism and its champions.

Essential to that project is ideological clarity.

One critical issue facing the left today is the nature and behavior of contemporary capitalism on the international level-- what Lenin characterized as imperialism.

Over the recent period, I have offered several interventions on the question, primarily to shed light on the two most recent and dangerous wars-- the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Understanding these wars is impossible without understanding imperialism today and understanding contemporary imperialism is not possible without subjecting that understanding to the practical test of explaining these two brutal wars.

My most recent intervention on this question has been challenged by Rainer Shea via Rainer’s Newsletter posted on Substack and X. His article, The KKE/Trotskyist effort to redefine imperialism, and how it undermines the global workers struggle, is largely a defensive rehash of the position taken by Carlos Garrido and addressed in my article. While it offers little new, it does provide an opportunity to clarify further.

Shea faults my article for failing “to find alleged examples of Russia or China engaging in imperialist actions.” But that is not what I promised to do, since I chose instead to clarify imperialism, to reject multipolarity as anti-imperialism, and to suggest that action in defense of Palestinians was a good litmus test of anti-imperialism.

I have consistently argued that imperialism is a system and capitalist-oriented nation-states participate in that system in various ways, as perpetrators, victims, and many times, both. What fundamentally determines imperialism is the maturation of capitalism into monopoly capitalism, along with the merging of bank capital with industrial capital. Marxists like Eugen Varga in the Soviet Union elaborated on these developments in the 1920s and 1930s. US Marxists like Anna Rochester and Victor Perlo carefully and thoroughly tracked the merging of industrial and bank capital through intermarriage, membership on interlocking boards of directors, stock purchases, mergers, etc. They tracked the various groups in the US organized around affinitive financial institutions, industries, and monopolies. 

The hyperaccumulation of capital generated by both industrial and financial monopoly corporations necessitates the export of capital, as well as risky financial schemes that promise new investment horizons or, almost inevitably, great crashes. 

The agents of this process are predatory monopoly corporations-- both industrial and financial-- and their action inevitably leads to spheres of interest (what Lenin calls “the division of the world among the international trusts”). It is the most powerful nation states that enforce this division of the entire world to the advantage of the favored monopoly corporations through occupation, force, threat, or other schemes.

This, in essence, is Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It is an explanation of how a global capitalist system operates under specific, evolving conditions. It is not a criterion for which nation-state is or is not imperialist or anti-imperialist. Imperialism is capitalism beyond its infancy operating on the international stage and not merely a club of exclusive members. That is why today, as in Lenin’s time, it will not disappear as long as capitalism exists. 

Lenin can shed further light on the flawed “new imperialism” embraced by Shea and Garrido. Writing late in 1916 in Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Lenin scorns Kautsky’s claim that, with an anticipated weakened England (the overwhelmingly dominant global capitalist power of the time, like the US today), ‘there is nothing to fight about’.

On the contrary, not only have the capitalists something to fight about now, but they cannot help fighting if they want to preserve capitalism, for without a forcible redivision of colonies the new imperialist countries cannot obtain the privileges enjoyed by the older (and weaker) imperialist powers. [Lenin’s emphasis]

Lenin was right and Kautsky was wrong. After World War I, England continued to descend as the dominant power in the imperialist system, to be supplanted by the US within decades. And the US behaved with an even more overbearing global swagger than its predecessor.

Is there any compelling reason-- contra Lenin--- to believe that “In this era, one of our foremost missions is to defeat U.S. dominance in particular, which would thereby cause the imperial system as a whole to unravel” [my emphasis], as Shea contends? Like Kautsky, Shea believes that with the US knocked off the system’s pedestal, there would be nothing to fight about…

Our best efforts to defeat imperialism is not to applaud rivals to US domination, but to fight capitalism at home, the engine of both US domination abroad and the imperialist system. 

Both Garrido and Shea-- in their determination to cast Russia and the PRC as bulwarks against imperialism-- distract from the fight against capitalism. While we all --that is, all peace-loving people-- must stand against US aggression against Russia, the PRC, or any other country; we should not confuse that stance with the struggle against imperialism which is, in its essence, a fight against capitalism.

For those of us who profess Marxism, socialism, or Communism, nothing is gained by detaching imperialism from capitalism; nothing is gained by imagining that there can be a capitalist world without imperialism, if only the US were brought to its knees. 

Exploitation of labor and the appropriation of profit are still the engine of the capitalist mode of production, including in its current stage: imperialism. We are not, as Garrido contends, in a new stage, with imperialism based upon “debt and interest.” The workers in the so-called “Global South” are primarily exploited by their bourgeoisie and/or multi-national corporations (Lenin’s cartels), not by banks issuing credit cards or mortgages or by greedy insurance companies. The national debt and costly interest payments that plague less developed nations are akin to the personal debt of workers insofar as their subjugation will not be resolved by reforming banks or international institutions. The idea that debt, onerous interest payments, or labor exploitation will disappear under any restructuring of the global capitalist order is naïve, at best. Does anyone believe that debt, interest, or exploitation would dissolve if banks were reformed on the national level? If Goldman Sachs were dissolved?

It was a dream of post-World War II social democrats and many “popular-fronters” to construct a global trade architecture that would be “fair” to large and small, powerful and weak. They imagined institutions that would guarantee a fair playing field, while retaining capitalist exchange relations. Of course, those institutions have failed as they did with the earlier post-World War I project, the League of Nations. In both cases, the big and powerful came to dominate the institutions and continued to dominate the small and the weak. Why would anyone-- including Garrido-- expect a different result if the US would vacate its current position of dominance? Does history teach us nothing? 

Garrido has fallen under the sway of bourgeois economists like Michael Hudson, who dream of a debt jubilee under existing national and international conditions, thought to be attainable with the dethroning of the US as imperialism’s hegemon. Such memories of an ancient practice are distractions from today’s most urgent struggles.

It would be unconscionable to leave this question without noting Shea’s gratuitous slander of the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Shea’s identification of KKE with Trotskyism shows that he has little understanding of either. 

While the KKE is certainly more than capable of defending its position on issues that are critical for the left without my help, I must remind tweet-Communists of the long, principled, and illustrious history of Greek Communism, the Party’s role in defeating German, Italian, and Greek fascism, its sacrifices for national liberation and socialism, its ideological steadfastness, and-- most recently-- its determined effort to build Communist unity.

One can be critical of KKE without associating it with Trotskyism, without resorting to an anti-Communist slur. It diminishes the discussion and diminishes a participant with little or no experience or knowledge of the Communist movement.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com  

Is This a Horst Wessel Moment?

For several days, while Wessel lay critically wounded in a Berlin hospital, Goebbels issued daily health bulletins on his new hero. And since Ali Höhler belonged to a Communist street gang, Goebbels portrayed the gun battle as an infamous act of political terrorism. The Gauleiter wrote an emotional account of his visit to the hospital, and he quoted from the hero’s song: “Comrades shot dead by the Red front and Reaction march in spirit with our ranks!” When Horst Wessel finally died, Goebbels staged a tremendous funeral. “His song made him immortal,” Goebbels cried, and, echoing the line about the marching dead, he called out “Horst Wessel!” And the assembled Storm Troopers shouted: “Present!” Goebbels… said of the dead youth “...Come to me: I will redeem you.” Then everyone sang the “Horst Wessel Song,” which, after Goebbels had produced enough pamphlets and posters, was to become the Nazis’ official anthem. Before the Deluge, Otto Friedrich (1972)

The murder or assassination of Charlie Kirk has become an event threatening to radically reshape the political landscape, with the MAGA right exploiting Kirk’s violent death occurring at an outdoor event at a Utah university. 

Immediately after Kirk’s demise a storm of controversy arose over its meaning. For most US citizens, Kirk was not a well known figure. As with other instances of political violence, the fact that attacks are growing in frequency draws more concern, more discussion than an identification with the victim.

But with the elites of the right and their media servants, Kirk was a rising star, a charismatic youth leader poised for future greatness. He was credited with bringing young people into the MAGA movement, though polls still show young people leaning more and more left. With a dysfunctional Democratic Party, his role was to herd dissatisfaction rightward, especially with college students. His death has elevated him into a martyr of the MAGA cause. He has been canonized in ruling MAGA circles.

For their most prominent political foes-- the liberal elites and their covey of pundits-- Kirk was a dangerous character, especially on social and lifestyle conversations that obsess them. They recognize that he was good at selecting lightning rod issues that challenge liberals. He was not such an easy target with centrists as Trump, since Kirk offered a self-confident, reasonable style that separated him from Trump’s bombast and arrogance. 

While fear was central to his message, it was buffered by a nostalgia for an imagined earlier time when everyone got along, worshiped the same God, and basked in patriotic light. Kirk sought to hide the racism and sexism that flowed freely beneath the surface with denial and artfulness.

In short, Charlie Kirk was a MAGA con man, in a political universe filled with con artists and wannabee con artists.

In the aftermath, MAGA hucksters have manufactured a remarkable narrative that has elevated Kirk to a national status that he never earned; they have constructed an elaborate network of blame that links everything and every one who stood in opposition to MAGA to Kirk’s murder; and they have frightened easily frightened liberals into condoling Kirk’s death and attesting to his great “human” worth.

 But most disgustingly, MAGA shock troops established an atmosphere so thick with fear that virtually ANYONE can be banished from status, employment, or reputation who dares challenge the sainthood of Charlie Kirk.

This demonstrates to all the unbridled power and ruthlessness of the MAGA camp.

But there is another side to this story, a chapter of equal, perhaps, more significance.

That is the role of the institutional enablers. A cornerstone of liberal democratic theory is the structural guide rails of political life supposedly established by the constitution, the body of law, the court system, the security sectors, the regulatory agencies, the educational system, and-- perhaps most importantly-- the media. These rules and institutions are hailed as barriers to abuse, corruption, and anti-democratic acts; they are alleged guarantors of universal and absolute personal rights and protections. 

Their citation and their celebration are instilled early and often in the citizenry of Europe and North America. Citizens are told that living under the umbrella of these guarantees is what separates the civilized West, from the unfortunates in the rest of the world.

Curiously, they have always failed when they are most needed; they collapse before the weight of powerful forces-- the forces that they are meant to resist. The failure of the guard rails to protect outspoken or dissident voices from the wrath of university administrators, government bullies, anti-immigration thugs, or media executives at this moment is only the latest example of a long history of failure. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the systematic abridgement of the thirteenth and fourteenth Constitutional amendments after Reconstruction, the anti-Red repression after World Wars I and II are among a host of anti-democratic turning points that left the US democratic reputation tarnished and left an indelible stain on political life.

Those who speak most fervently about the virtues of our system, those who manage and govern the institutional guide rails are often the first to surrender to the challenges to free speech and open advocacy. The University presidents and administrators who turned campuses into bastions of thought conformity, the government bureaucrats who quietly watched their colleagues cast into unemployment, the union leaders who vigorously “regretted” the stripping of union rights from hundreds of thousands of government employees, and the employers-- from school boards to corporate media executives-- who fired employees who dared to speak against the ludicrous beatification of Charlie Kirk-- fall in line without a fight. 

One of the US’s better writers, Dalton Trumbo, writing in 1949, called the early anti-Red hysteria of the time “The Time of the Toad”. Trumbo-- himself a top Hollywood writer who was fired, jailed, and blacklisted for his Communist Party membership-- recalled a story by Emile Zola involving a man “inuring himself against  newspaper columns” by devouring a raw toad everyday “so he could face almost any newspaper with a tranquil stomach… and actually relish that which to healthy men not similarly immunized would be a lethal poison.”

  Trumbo and Zola were correct to see the news media and the commentariat as administering “a lethal poison”. Their thirst for sensationalism, scandal, and vulgarity played a significant role in pushing Trump onto the political stage. Their uncritical embrace of bipartisan, imperialist foreign policy accounts for widespread national disinterest in the US’s bloody hand. They have shown themselves dutiful puppets of wealth and power. And now the owners, editors, script writers, and faces of the media are enthusiastically bending a knee to MAGA’s assault on the little independence that they have retained. 

In early 1930 Germany, the Hitlerites sought to turn the death of a contemptible, minor SA leader into an affront to the entire German nation. Through Goebbels unprincipled, unscrupulous propaganda campaign, through the support of big business, military leaders, opportunist “mainstream” politicians, and a sensation-seeking media, they succeeded. 

The only barriers to their further success in 1930 stood a powerful labor movement, a dominant Social Democratic Party, and a growing, popular Communist Party. Nonetheless, in the September 1930 election the Nazi party became the second largest party, gaining 95 seats in the Reichstag.

What barriers do we have? 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com